Sunday, May 15, 2011

Getting Your Books Noticed - Conf 670

Rare treat, lunch out. At the Wolseley no less. What a place. Thanks, I'm sure, to my starry author companions we got the top balcony table looking down over it all!

Good celeb-spot spot. Gordon Ramsay comes here for his porridge and blueberries every morning and Terence Stamp comes for tea. I didn't see anybody - apart from my esteemed companions of course. THINK I saw Alan Whicker on Piccadilly, sure I recognised the blazer and the jib of the (now very white) moustache. Anyway, to the important bit. My other half is scared of mince, he has a real, real fear of it. I don't cook it at home very much, making this a double double treat:

The Wolseley Shepherd's Pie

Being the only self-published, digital girl there it was interesting to compare notes. The Holy Mother of all the grails of getting noticed once you're published is still the supermarket buyer. If Big Supermarket Buyer decides to stock your novel, and goes through with their decision, you can start breathing again.

I've been doing ebooks a while now but have only just discovered the important digital equivalent of the supermarket shelves and the good old Waterstones tables. My sales have been growing slowly slowly. Logged on this morning to find this:

Ebooks are so new in UK it's not that hard to get in the charts but in the US it's much harder. This got there thanks to the Tagging system. If a book is tagged in Amazon it goes up their internal search list. So, if you're looking to read about selling ebooks and put Sell Ebooks into search you get:

Or if you want to see what's popular in contemporary fiction. There I am No. 1 of 2,711 products: